“Fox & Friends” host Elisabeth Hasselbeck took to Twitter on Tuesday to compare the controversy over the NFL’s handling of domestic abuse cases and the White House’s handling of the Sept. 11, 2012, terror attack on American facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

“Imagine if everyone that asked for transparency in the #nfl @nfl Demanded that same #transparency in our #government #Benghazi,” Hasselbeck wrote on Twitter.

….

Fox News has been criticized for what some call an obsession with placing the blame for Benghazi on the Obama administration. According to a study conducted by liberal watchdog group Media Matters, Fox News’ primetime lineup ran 1,098 segments on Benghazi in the first 20 months following the attacks, including 281 segments alleging a “coverup” by the Obama administration.

Fox “News”? Obsessed with pinning blame for something on Obama? Perish the thought! Inconceivable, even. We all know that Fox “News” is just another arm of the liberal media, after all. (By the way, that is an actual statement I heard while listening in to an argument at a local Tea Party event. Yes, I know that it is not a common belief, even for the true lunatic fringe, but I still get a kick out of knowing someone out there actually believes that it is true. Someone who votes.) That being said, one can kind of understand why members of Fox & Friends would want to draw attention elsewhere, after the masterful way their male hosts handled the issue the day TMZ released The Video:

Hasselbeck is not the only “Fox & Friends” host to stir controversy while weighing in on the NFL’s domestic abuse problem.

Last week, her co-hosts, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy, joked about a lesson to be learned from the video showing Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious in an elevator.

“I think the message is, take the stairs,” Kilmeade said during a discussion of the video.

“The message is, when you’re in an elevator, there are cameras,” co-host Steve Doocy added.

I have to admit that if I was unlucky enough to find myself on camera with them while they made those comments, I may have yelled “Benghazi!!!” as well. Anything so those words wouldn’t stick in people’s memory. Of course, this being Fox & Friends, those comments, no matter how offensive most of us may find them, more than likely drew laughs, guffaws, chuckles, high fives, and cries of “right on, ain’t no camera in the stairs.”

Now that I have seen the light, thanks to Elisabeth Hasselbeck, you may be noticing some changes around here. While the URL will remain the same for convenience, the name of the blog will be changing to Foster Benghazi. Rather than spending time writing about religious fundamentalists, science denial, and meaningless issues such as a woman’s right to control of her own body, marriage equality, and an end to racism, sexism, misogyny, rape culture, homophobia, and forced observance of other people’s religious beliefs, I will now be dedicating the space to nothing but stories about Benghazi. Do not think that means you won’t find variety, however, here at Foster Benghazi. Nothing could be further from the truth. You’ll see stories trying to convince you that Benghazi is a scandal, that it is a scandal worth paying attention to, that the blame for the scandal is completely Obama’s, that the Obama administration conspired with rock creatures from the center of the Earth, and the known terrorist sympathizer race of Rodent Hominids from the Moon to hide the truth about Benghazi from the American public, that Obama himself ordered the killing of the four Americans at Benghazi, that Hillary Clinton pulled the trigger that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens at Benghazi, and that Fox “News” and the conservative media have desperately tried to create a scandal out of Benghazi so that the GOP can reap political good fortune and turn four dead American citizens into votes on election day, thereby allowing them to sweep into power, stock the Supreme Court with Constitution raping judges, outlaw abortion and birth control, and pass huge tax cuts for the richest Americans, creating enough kick backs that every member of the GOP establishment (not the voters though. They get fleeced with the rest of them) can retire and move to a tropical island nation where brown skinned natives wear white gloves and full suits while serving them on the sun soaked beaches. Whoa, got a little out of control there. Did I mention Benghazi?

For a taste of whats to come, here it the first new story at Foster Benghazi by your blogger, Foster Benghazi.

6.7 million viewers tuned in for the 2015 Miss America competition Sunday night. Imagine the results if 6.7 million Americans demanded that the Obama administration explain why they killed Americans in Benghazi?(Get the idea yet?) The LA Times reports that there were 303,900 tweets about the pageant. Imagine the response if 303,900 tweets were posted demanding that Vice President Biden explain exactly why he personally beheaded 2 of the 4 Americans sacrificed to Allah during the false flag operation at Benghazi. (Okay, I am getting the hang of this.) For that matter, what is The LA Times doing reporting about something as insignificant as the Miss America competition when they could be devoting 110% of their resources to getting to the bottom of the real reason Hillary Clinton ordered the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, a move that ended the lives of three other Americans at Benghazi, and finally reveal that it was indeed “that time of the month” for Hillary, proving once again that a woman in the White House would result in nuclear war every 30 days. And Benghazi! (Almost forgot it that time.)

In less depressing news, while 6.7 million Americans did tune into the Miss America competition, a competition rumored to have been organized by the Obama administration as an attempt to distract the American public from Obama’s criminal actions in Benghazi, 16.5 million viewers tuned in to watch Sunday Night Football. While those 16.5 million should have been writing angry blog posts about the murderer in the White House and his plans to declare himself “Allah’s Chosen Ruler and Official Hitler for Life” the month before the 2016 election, a plan exposed to the public only after a careful examination of the Benghazi incident, there is a possible silver lining to those numbers. An anonymous source, who I quite possibly just made up in my head while typing this sentence, has informed me that 16 million Americans, outraged over the Stalin like actions of Hillary Clinton in Benghazi where she helped the Obama administration slaughter a rumored 3 million American citizens, with 4 confirmed deaths, only decided to watch Sunday Night Football because they figured their best chance of seeing a woman, standing in for Hillary in their minds, get punched in the face was by watching the NFL. Rather than watching football on the off chance a domestic battery breaks out, those 16 million should march on Washington and demand their God given right to punch Hillary in the face for her treasonous actions in (say it with me now) Benghazi.

I hope you enjoyed that taste of the new Foster Benghazi. I will return tomorrow with more hard hitting coverage of the biggest scandal our galaxy has ever experienced, the story some people are saying “makes Watergate look like lying about a blow job, the story sure to bring down not only the Obama administration, but the entire communist-Nazi-Muslim soaked Demon-cratic Party, Benghazi. Until then, this is Foster Benghazi signing off.

To turn off the satire for a second here, the worst thing (or one of the worst things) about this obsession over Benghazi on the right is the cover it provides Obama on real issues that actually should be scandalous. As surprising as it may sound to you, especially since I covered both the 2008 and the 2012 elections while endorsing and promoting Obama, and volunteering for both campaigns, I have one thing in common with many members of the GOP’s congressional membership; I want Obama to be impeached.

After that though, the differences are legion. While the Republicans want him impeached just so they can say they impeached him, and if they had the votes would push through an impeachment for something akin to lying about oral sex and debating the meaning of the word “is,” I want him impeached for the way he and his administration have routinely wiped their ass with the Constitution when it comes to secrecy, executive power, and the ability to detain indefinitely if not just outright execute American citizens. Mr. President, you lied to me and the rest of the American people when you said you would be different than Mr. Bush on these issues. You fooled me the first time, I am ashamed to admit. The second time you got my vote because the thought of the current GOP in power scares me into a panic attack. You got my votes because the system is broken. Obama is a center right politician who leans into wingnut territory when it comes to executive power and a few other issues, who can take practically any stance on any issue he feels like taking, and make any campaign promise that benefits him without any need to honor said promise, because the other party, in our brilliant 2 party system, has legitimate national candidates suggesting things such as letting the uninsured die outside the emergency room if they don’t have the money to pay, poking bears, poking Iran, poking both bears and Iran, starting more wars by fiat, banning contraception, declaring the USA a Christian Nation, and increasing the rate of capital punishment just as we start to learn how easy it is for an innocent man to end up on death row. Obama could sacrifice a baby on national tv during a special telecast that he forces HBO to air during the season 5 premier of Game of Thrones and I would shrug and say, “Well, he’s still better than Santorum.” How broken is the system? That last sentence is my response to that question.

Of course, no one will ever hold Obama accountable for using the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as his own personal cum towel. The GOP would love to impeach him, but they can’t go after him for actual legitimate impeachable offenses, because then they would have to admit George W. Bush committed the same crimes against the people as Obama. The Democrats have no reason to impeach him because they are creatures of the system like our President. As much as the Constitution is rallied around these days, it is such a depressing minority that have a problem with the executive branch deciding that whole “checks and balances” thing the founders came up with is a bit too outdated for the War on Terrorism age. And you Obama apologists out there may tsk at me, and say things like “Now Foster, Obama realizes the amount of power he has been given to deal with terrorism, but he has pledged, pledged!, not to use that power unjustly.” And even if I believed a thing he said after two campaigns worth of ignored promises (and I am not talking about promises he made that the GOP has blocked him on either, just promises that he has broken himself), even if I trusted him with, say, the power to indefinitely detain American citizens, I sure as hell wouldn’t trust a President Santorum, President Romney, President Ryan, President McCain, President Christie, President Perry, President Jindal, or hell, a President H.R. Clinton to honor that promise either.

The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).

Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the nation elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward black people whether they recognize those feelings or not.

….

Racial prejudice has risen slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of those surveyed expressed explicit racist attitudes toward black people, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the share with racist sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing positive attitudes toward black people fell.

It’s not just blacks either. Americans have more than enough hate to go around.

While I am sure the people who keep insisting to me that racism is no longer a problem in the United States are shocked over these findings, not everyone was surprised by the results.

Experts on race said they were not surprised by the findings.

‘‘We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked,’’ said Jelani Cobb, director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. ‘‘When we’ve seen progress, we’ve also seen backlash.’’

AP Uses Online Poll To Claim Increased Racism In U.S.

Finally, some fair and balanced coverage. I mean, online polls are unscientific! Everyone knows that. The dishonesty in that headline would be shocking if it wasn’t from Fox. Of course this wasn’t your average unscientific web poll. From the Washington Post’s coverage:

All the surveys were conducted online. Other research has shown that poll takers are more likely to share unpopular attitudes when they are filling out a survey using a computer rather than speaking with an interviewer. Respondents were randomly selected from a nationally representative panel maintained by GfK Custom Research.

Wonder why Fox would try to spin this poll as some meaningless online survey with questionable results? Could it have something to do with the percentage of Republicans the poll found with explicitly racist views? Go back to the start and reread that number. I report, you decide.

Oh, and if you really want to lose faith in humanity, spend about an hour reading right wing blogs talking about this poll. I do not suggest that you actually do this, but if you really want to watch people disassemble, shift blame, grasp at straws, and outright deny reality, here is an opportunity.

Sometimes I feel like this political season is all part of an episode of Punk’d. Any day now, Ashton will show up on CNN with his camera crew and let all of America in on the joke:

“Damn you people are oblivious! We had Mitt say he didn’t give a fuck about the very poor, we had Newt, fucking Newt Gingrich!!!, talk about the sanctity of marriage, and you idiots still bought every word. We had to find a way to close up the show, so we made Rick “Ol’ Frothy” Santorum the front-runner, and had all our ‘candidates’ attack birth control, and you people still thought it was legit. Seriously, it’s 2012! America, you’ve been Punk’d!!!”

Yes, it would be obnoxious, but at least those of us still clinging to our sanity could breathe a little easier. For the first time since I’ve been politically aware, I am genuinely frightened by the tone and direction of the political discussion this season. It’s no secret that my political views lean towards the left. I consider myself a progressive libertarian, but I won’t deny that many of my stances on issues can be called “liberal,” if not “far-left.” That being said, I have never voted a straight party ticket in any election, and am only registered as a democrat because I wanted to vote in the 2008 primary. Politics is not a sporting event and it shouldn’t be treated as such. Too many people root for their party like they root for their football team; “screw what’s good for the country, as long as my team wins I win!”

First off, I am not claiming the Fox News supports or agrees with any of these comments. They tried deleting them, and eventually just took the whole comment thread down when it got completely out of control. Which was the right thing to do.

Next, I am not suggesting that these comments represent all fans of Fox News, or even the majority of their readers/viewers/consumers. But they do represent a portion of their readers. One or two bad apples does not an epic, hate-fueled thread make.

And finally, Trigger Warning: Vile racist shit directed mainly at the recently deceased. Seriously, don’t go below the fold unless you want to get pissed off and sickened.

I don’t even know what to say about this any more. There’s a real sickness running rampant in the right wing; the Fox News comment thread on Whitney Houston’s death is yet another disgusting deluge of outright racism: Singer Whitney Houston Dies at 48 | Fox News.

There are almost 5000 comments posted in the thread — these are from the first few pages.

That is the last thing you will read in this post that won’t make you ill.

About the Author

Described as "intelligent but self-destructive," Foster Disbelief spent his twenties furiously attempting to waste his potential in a haze of religion and heroin. Science and atheism allowed him to escape his twin addictions and he now spends his days attempting to make the most of his three remaining brain cells.